Springsteen's protest song Streets of Minneapolis is an act of bravery

[highplainsdem]

This is from the British paper The Times, from their chief music critic.

Springsteen’s protest song Streets of Minneapolis is an act of bravery
Not since Neil Young’s Ohio in 1970 has a song by a major name been written, recorded and released in protest at government-sanctioned violence so quickly

Will Hodgkinson, Chief Rock and Pop Critic
Thursday January 29 2026, 12.45pm GMT, The Times


Bruce Springsteen has always been a social commentator, not a protest singer. Think of classics like Born to Run and Badlands, or his 2012 album Wrecking Ball: portraits of working-class dreams, lives spinning out of control and industrial decay. But desperate times call for direct measures and Streets of Minneapolis is a rapid response unit of a song, detailing ICE agents’ raids on the city and the killings that followed, without metaphor or allusion. Not since Neil Young’s Ohio, released a few days after the National Guard killed four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, has a song by a major name been written, recorded and released in protest at government-sanctioned violence so quickly.

Streets of Minneapolis sounds like an old folk song recalling a historical injustice, which is surely Springsteen’s aim. “King Trump’s private army from the DHS, guns belted to their coats, came to Minneapolis to enforce the law, or so their story goes,” he roars, mirroring Young’s naming of Richard Nixon in Ohio. From there, as the song builds into an E Street Band epic complete with harmonica, rolling organ and communal choir, comes a straightforward account of the ICE saga in Minneapolis: peaceful protest met with rubber bullets, dawn raids, “and two left dead to lie on snow-filled streets, Alex Pretti and Renée Good”.

Springsteen is being brave here, documenting the darkest moment in the Trump era since the attempted coup of January 6, 2021. He sings about claims that ICE agents were acting in self-defence against all evidence to the contrary; that it’s “our blood and bones and whistles and phones against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies”. The homeland security adviser Stephen Miller and the secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem might be able to shrug it off as the woke ramblings of a rock star from the liberal elite but being namechecked in a protest song from a beloved household name also guarantees being enshrined on the wrong side of history.

-snip-

“We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis,” he roars, which is surely the purpose of the song. Not since Streets of Philadelphia, his 1993 portrait of a man dying of Aids, has Springsteen so distinctly used a specific event to highlight a broader national crisis.

[Ocelot II]

1. I was hoping for something like "Ohio," a song that's been running through my mind lately

(as one who is old enough to remember Kent State). Springsteen came through!

[highplainsdem]

2. Yes. This was the song we needed now.